Eve Ewing's new book: Electric Arches

Eve Ewing is a post doctoral scholar at SSA. Her new book, Electric Arches, will be released on September 12th and available through Haymarket Books. Read a description of the book below:

Electric Arches is an imaginative exploration of black girlhood and womanhood through poetry, visual art, and narrative prose. Blending stark realism with the surreal and fantastic, Eve L. Ewing’s narrative takes us from the streets of 1990s Chicago to the story of an alien arrival in an unspecified future, deftly navigating the boundaries of space, time, and reality with delight and flexibility. Ewing imagines familiar figures in magical or surreal circumstances—blues legend Koko Taylor is a tall-tale hero; LeBron James travels through time and encounters his teenage self. She identifies everyday objects—hair moisturizer, a spiral notebook—as precious icons. Her visual art is spare, playful, and poignant—a cereal box decoder ring that allows the wearer to understand what black girls are saying; a teacher's angry, subversive message scrawled on the chalkboard. Electric Arches invites fresh conversations about race, gender, the city, identity, and the joy and pain of growing up, through a distinctive new voice.